The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  It couldn’t have been an easy meeting for the Kennedy men, who had sat at the Cabinet table or, like Ted Sorensen, against the wall behind the man who had presided over past meetings, his personality dominating the room. Now Jack Kennedy was lying in a coffin not far away; several of the Cabinet members and White House staffers had come to the meeting directly from the East Room with its catafalque; as they entered the Cabinet Room, they could see, in the hallway beyond it, by the Oval Office door, Jack Kennedy’s rocking chair sitting, upside down, on a mover’s dolly. Bundy had written a note to Johnson, advising him to keep the meeting “very short.… A number of them and perhaps still more of the others who regularly attend the Cabinet are still numb with personal grief.” It couldn’t have been an easy meeting for Lyndon Johnson. It had been in the Cabinet Room that he had had to sit, powerless and silent, through so many meetings; in the Cabinet Room that, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy’s hostility to him had been so vividly displayed. The men sitting around the long table knew who had thereafter been invited to the final decision-making meeting on Cuba—and who hadn’t.

  As Johnson, sitting now in the President’s place, opened the meeting with a prepared statement, one chair at the table was empty—the attorney general’s. Robert Kennedy had agreed that the meeting should be held, his only request was that there be “no pictures.” At the last minute, however, he may have been unable to bring himself to attend it—“I was upset” by the conversations he had had with Johnson in Dallas and by the morning’s confrontation, he was to explain, “so by this time I was rather fed up by him.… But I went by and Mac Bundy said it was very important that I come in. So I went.” Bundy himself said that “Bobby was late and perhaps would not have attended if I had not told him he must”; he had “virtually to drag” him into the room, he was to say—if those statements are correct, the national security advisor may have made another mistake.

  When Bobby entered the room, his face so racked with grief that men who hadn’t seen him since the assassination were shocked, Johnson was speaking, but several of the Cabinet members stood up and remained standing as the attorney general walked to his chair. Johnson didn’t stand up, and as soon as Kennedy sat down, continued his statement. To Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, watching Robert Kennedy, it was “quite clear that he could hardly countenance Lyndon Johnson sitting in his brother’s seat.” When Johnson finished—“The President is dead. The President must keep the business of this government moving. None of us in this room can really express the sadness we all feel. Yet we have work to do. And must do it.… I want you all to stay on. I need you”—Dean Rusk and Adlai Stevenson spoke, pledging their support to the new President, and the meeting quickly ended.

  “Awful” was how Willard Wirtz described it—“almost mechanical”; “a drab little meeting,” Bundy said. Back in EOB 274, Johnson raged about Kennedy. When Orville Freeman, who was taking every opportunity to be in Johnson’s presence, walked over to the EOB to discuss the meeting with him, Johnson said that Kennedy had arrived late on purpose to ruin the effect of his statement; he had already learned, he said, that Kennedy had told “an aide” that “We won’t go in until he has already sat down.” “There was real bitterness in Lyndon’s voice on this one,” Freeman wrote in his diary. (When Manchester later passed on this story, Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “Kennedy expressed amazement at first, then amusement.”)

  Bitter or not, however, Lyndon Johnson had to deal with Robert Kennedy again that afternoon, for there was still the question of when he should address Congress. Harry Truman had delivered his speech to the joint session on the day following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral, believing that to reinforce the aura of continuity it was important that the nation hear the new President in a formal setting “as soon as possible.” Another argument to support Johnson’s feelings that his speech should be given the day after Kennedy’s funeral—on Tuesday, in other words—was that Thursday was Thanksgiving, and, wanting to be home for the holiday, many congressmen might be leaving Washington on Wednesday. “I’ll make it Tuesday if I can,” Johnson told House Speaker McCormack. “I can’t sit still. I’ve got to keep the government going.” But there was the matter of keeping “the Kennedy aura.” “I don’t want the family to feel I have any lack of respect … so I have a very delicate wire to walk here.” (If Johnson had any doubts about which of the two considerations—continuity or aura—was more important, McCormack, a very shrewd politician, helped dispel them, if tactfully. “On the question of Tuesday or Wednesday,” he said, “don’t you let that disturb you at all.… It’s a delicate field for all. You should respect the delicacy.… That’s all I say, and this is of paramount importance and gravity.”) A Tuesday speech, Johnson told a visitor that day, “might be resented by the family.”

  When Johnson suggested Tuesday, he found out how deep that resentment might be. “I didn’t like that,” Robert Kennedy was to recall. “I thought we should just wait one day—at least one day after the funeral.” He communicated his feelings to Bundy, but Johnson sent Bundy back to him to say that “they [the ‘they’ was unidentified] want it on Tuesday.” Kennedy’s response was an angry “Well, the hell with it. Why do you ask me about it? Don’t ask me what you want done. You’ll tell me what it’s going to be anyway. Just go ahead and do it.” Johnson didn’t give up, sending a Kennedy relative—Sargent Shriver—as an emissary, but Kennedy’s response was even angrier: “Why does he tell you to ask me? Now he’s hacking at you. He knows I want him to wait until Wednesday.” Shriver reported this response to Johnson. Without a word, the President picked up his telephone, and, angrily, punching one button after another, said a single terse sentence to each person he was calling: “It will be on Wednesday.”

  Lyndon had had to deal with Robert Kennedy three times Saturday. After the first of those encounters, he had had to retreat from the Oval Office, the second had resulted in his Cabinet meeting being “ruined,” in the third he had had to give in on the scheduling of his speech. In some ways, that Saturday was a reprise of his three years as Vice President: constant conflict with Robert Kennedy—and constant defeat. Given the importance of keeping the support of the Kennedy faction, there was nothing he could do about it. He told Reedy to announce that he would not move into the Oval Office until Tuesday, the day after the funeral. For three days—Saturday, Sunday and Monday—he would work out of Room 274.

  15

  The Drums

  A HARD RAIN had begun to fall just before daybreak on Saturday; through it, on the television cameras shooting with long-range lenses from Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House looked gray, the November-bare limbs of the trees in front of it black from the rain, the remaining leaves sodden and dark. Through the rain, all that day, black limousines pulled up to the North Portico, with its familiar lantern and its black-draped doorway, one after the other, in an endless line, and as the car doors opened, Marines snapping to attention with their heels hitting the pavement so loudly that the click was picked up by television microphones, out stepped senators and ambassadors (Dobrynin clasping his hands together and trying to keep his composure), generals and admirals, in uniforms stiff with medals and braid; men who had to be identified by the newscasters (seventy-one-year-old John McCormack, with his shock of snow-white hair, eighty-six-year-old Carl Hayden, laboriously climbing the stairs with a cane supporting him on one side and a policeman on the other), and men with faces everyone knew: Truman, Eisenhower. One by one, or couple by couple, they walked up the steps between rigid men in dress uniforms with rifles held high. The chief justice and his wife; when they emerged after viewing the casket, Mrs. Warren could no longer maintain her composure, and, during the long minutes while the Warrens waited on the portico for their car to pull up, she stood weeping.

  Dusk fell, the rain continued, through it the great lantern shone; as each car was pulling up to the stairs, its headlights swept across the white columns; on the second floor of the Wh
ite House, to the left of the portico, in the living quarters, there was a single lit window.

  And television, cutting away from the portico to West Executive Avenue, showed America other pictures that day: of “the removal of the late President’s personal effects from the White House office—cartons of files, a large globe, a model of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,” TV newscaster David Brinkley said in his dry voice. They were taken out the West Wing door and trundled on movers’ dollies across to the EOB, where they would be stored temporarily. Then another artifact came out. When Brinkley had finished explaining to his viewers about the rocking chair, he bit his lip. Television showed the President’s mother, veiled and holding her Bible, supported by two men as she made her way to morning Mass in Hyannis; they couldn’t show the father, for he didn’t come out of his house, but TV told the world that President Kennedy’s youngest brother, Teddy, and his sister Eunice had flown to Hyannis to break the news to the patriarch: “It is said that he took [it] remarkably well,” television reported. Television didn’t get a glimpse of Jack Kennedy’s children that day, and there wasn’t too much information about how they had been told, or about how they had reacted, but television showed a lot of film of John Jr. and Caroline playing in the Oval Office, romping with their father; viewers could imagine how they had reacted.

  Over and over on Saturday television showed the scenes that had occurred at the White House during the previous night—at 4:30 a.m. It showed the White House and the marble gates to the horseshoe driveway brilliantly white in TV floodlights, and the Marine honor guard drawn up in the driveway. As the cameras swung toward the gates, a dark shape appeared beyond them in the darkness, and, as it came into the lights, it was seen to be the ambulance bringing the President’s body from Bethesda. Television showed the honor guard marching, rifles high at port arms, in front of the ambulance to the portico—to the tall columns and the hanging lantern behind them, and the doorway draped in black—and it showed the coffin, covered now in a flag, being lifted out by uniformed men and carried up the steps, past other guards, hands at the salute, staring straight ahead when the widow, still in the pink suit, and the brother walked past them. Most of the country had been sleeping when those scenes occurred, but television showed them, over and over, that Saturday, so the country saw them as if they were happening then, that day. And before dawn television crews had been briefly allowed into the East Room, and the film they had taken there was shown over and over again that day, so that over and over again America saw the black catafalque, like Lincoln’s catafalque, the black crepe on the draperies and chandeliers—and America saw, too, two workmen, after finishing some task in the East Room in those pre-dawn hours, start to leave and then stop at the two prie-dieux, and kneel, and cross themselves, and pray.

  Interspersed with all this were documentaries of Kennedy’s life—images of his smile, remembrances of his wit; pictures of him with his wife and children. And then there were replays of significant television programs in which he had participated. One of them was an hour-long interview he had held in the Oval Office with the three network correspondents, sitting relaxed and easy in the rocking chair. The country therefore saw him in his rocker, and then saw the rocker being trundled out on a dolly.

  There were pictures of Lyndon Johnson, too, that Saturday, of the new President inside his car, face grim, as he left The Elms and as he turned into West Executive Avenue that morning, of him walking quickly into and out of church from his car, of him walking across West Executive to the Cabinet meeting, a Secret Service agent holding an umbrella over his head.

  There were no television cameras in 274, as there were none in the White House; still photographs of him sitting at the conference table with Rusk and then McNamara were shown—“the first pictures … of him at work, as President,” Brinkley said—but they didn’t have much impact beside pictures of Jackie Kennedy following the coffin, or beside pictures of the honor guard, or beside pictures of what one broadcaster called “the mighty of the land filing into the White House … for a mournful adieu to President John F. Kennedy.” The Cabinet meeting had drama to it, but there were no pictures of that, live or still; indeed television mentioned it only briefly. There was no hint at all of what had happened between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy that morning. The new President did appear on television to read his proclamation establishing Monday as a day of national mourning, but he simply walked up to a makeshift microphone, quickly read the statement in a minute and a half, and left the room without another word. “He apparently decided just to read the proclamation and let it go at that,” a newscaster said. After summing up the day’s dramatic events in the White House, Brinkley added that “President Johnson in the meantime was across in the Executive Office Building … carrying on his business, meeting with the Cabinet.…” “President Johnson,” said another newscaster, “has been shall we say a little bit in the background today.”

  Newspapers covered his activities more thoroughly, running long articles about them on the front page. “President Lyndon B. Johnson took firm control of the reins of government,” the Washington Post said. “Mr. Johnson’s day was one of brisk activity,” the New York Times said. And the headlines about him were banner headlines—all across the top of the front page—just as were the headlines about Kennedy and Oswald. But the headlines about him had none of the drama of the headlines about Kennedy and Oswald. Across the top of the Washington Post’s front page, for example, the headlines were: NATION’S GREAT FILE PAST KENNEDY BIER: BODY LIES IN STATE AT CAPITOL TODAY; JOHNSON MOVES TO CARRY ON POLICIES. In the New York Times the banners were: KENNEDY’S BODY LIES IN WHITE HOUSE; JOHNSON AT HELM WITH WIDE BACKING; POLICE SAY PRISONER IS THE ASSASSIN. The stories about him weren’t the lead stories, but only the second lead. And in any event it wasn’t from newspapers, but from television that America was getting its news that day.

  AND THEN, the next morning, Sunday morning, began the roll of the drums.

  As the sun rose that morning, the rain gone, the pale blue sky seemingly without a cloud, the broad avenues between the White House and the Capitol were waiting, their roadways empty, the crowds lining them on the pavements packed solid, standing in silence.

  In front of the White House, the sounds were of horses’ hooves and the creaking of harnesses, and of rolling wooden wheels. A bare black wooden platform—a caisson, or artillery gun carriage—on four black wheels was pulled into the driveway and up to the North Portico by six matched gray horses in pairs, a rider on the left-hand horse in each pair, the saddle on the right horse empty, as was military custom for a fallen leader. Two heavy black straps had been attached to the caisson. It stood there, in front of the portico, for a while, black and bare, the straps dangling. Then, without ceremony except for the coming to attention, rifles held high, of the dress-uniformed men flanking the doorway and the steps down to the driveway, eight military pallbearers brought the flag-draped coffin out of the doorway and down the stairs, and lifted it onto the gun carriage. The straps were laid across the coffin, black against the bright red and white stripes, and buckled fast so that it couldn’t fall off.

  There was a pause, and suddenly, in the doorway, there she was.

  Jacqueline Kennedy was dressed all in black; she wasn’t crying—at least there were no tears on a face that might have been the model for a portrait of Grief. On either side of her was a small figure, dressed in a sky-blue coat, and she took their hands. Standing behind her, a little to the side, was Robert Kennedy, expressionless, still as a statue.

  They stood there while the caisson began to move away down the driveway toward Pennsylvania Avenue, between soldiers and sailors holding the flags of the fifty states, who dipped them in salute as the caisson passed. The first of a line of black limousines pulled into the portico, and the Kennedys walked down the steps as Clint Hill opened the back door of the car. Behind them the figures of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson came into view, and came down the steps; they and the Kennedys were to ride i
n the same car together. They got in, Jackie and Lyndon in the rear seat, with Caroline and John Jr. sitting next to their mother, Lady Bird and Robert in the jump seats, which faced forward, with Lady Bird in front of her husband. The car pulled slowly down the driveway behind the caisson. It waited at the end of the driveway, so that as the caisson came out between the gates, it came out alone. And as it came out, the drums began.

  Few people in Washington—few people in America, perhaps—had ever heard the sound of muffled drums, the tension on each drumhead loosened so that the resonance was deadened. With a whole corps playing muffled drums, as they were playing now, the roll of those drums filled the air—melancholy, ominous, final. And it was to that sound that the caisson came out onto Pennsylvania Avenue to take its place in a column—ahead of it, after the drum corps, priests marching abreast, three of them with their black robes billowing behind; warriors marching abreast, their medals glinting in the sun: the dead President’s military aides, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other generals, other admirals, a company of sailors with fixed, shining bayonets; an honor guard carrying the flag of his country, and, just behind the caisson bearing the dead President, carried by a single tall sailor, his own flag, the presidential standard. Shielded by the portico, the standard had hung limp, but as it came out between the gates, it was caught by a gust of wind so that it blew straight out, and the golden presidential seal, with its eagle holding an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other, stood out for a moment bold against the navy blue background. Behind that flag came a riderless horse, a magnificent tall black gelding, sword in its scabbard hanging from the saddle, but in the stirrups, boots turned backward to symbolize the fact that his fallen rider would never ride again; since the days of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, a riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups had followed fallen chieftains to their graves. Black Jack was a restless animal, always hard to control; he was prancing nervously now, tossing his head, trying to rear against the bit. Following him came the limousine carrying the Johnsons and the Kennedys and then a line of other limousines with Kennedy relatives and the dead President’s closest aides. None of the cars had its top down this time.